What This Is

Bold Efforts is a collection of essays about work, technology, ambition, business, and how to build a good life in a world that keeps changing.

I write from the perspective of someone building companies, studying how technology changes industries, and making many of these decisions in real time.

Some essays examine how AI is changing companies and careers. Others explore entrepreneurship, incentives, cities, real estate, decision-making, or the relationship between work and life.

The subjects vary. The underlying question is usually the same:

How should we think and act when the old assumptions no longer hold?

How the Essays Think

Bold Efforts is not a news publication.

I am less interested in what happened this week than in ideas that might still be useful five years from now.

That means looking beneath trends to the systems creating them: incentives, technology, economics, human behaviour, institutions, and the choices individuals make within them.

I try to write essays that help you see something differently, rather than simply tell you what to think.

There will be arguments, frameworks, observations, and occasionally questions I do not yet know how to answer. That is intentional.

About Me

I’m Kartik.

My career has moved between corporate strategy, technology, startups, investing, and building products. I spent several years at Emaar working on strategy and digital innovation, and have since worked with and built technology businesses of my own.

Today, I run Polynomial Studio, where I build and experiment with AI-native businesses, including Fursa.

Bold Efforts is where I step outside the day-to-day work and try to understand the larger forces behind what I am seeing.

Writing helps me turn experience into ideas, test my assumptions, and develop better judgement.

Why “Bold Efforts”

The name comes from a simple belief.

Most meaningful things are uncertain when you begin them.

Careers, companies, relationships, creative work, and important life decisions rarely come with enough information to guarantee the outcome.

You still have to choose.

Bold Efforts is about understanding those choices better, and having the courage to make them.